1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to security managing schemes for devising a countermeasure to meet access of an unjust portable terminal to a portable data-recording medium.
2. Background Art
Recently, portable recording mediums such as compact disks and memory cards have increasing capacities and decreasing sizes such that databases of a large capacity may be contained therein for carrying purposes.
Many salesmen carry their respective portable terminals to perform their daily sales activities. The portable terminals each have a built-in memory whose capacity is small, so that a part or all of a database used for transacting works thereof is stored in a portable storage medium. The salesmen set the storage mediums in their terminals, carry the terminals to their customers/clients, and there access data stored in the storage mediums to display, output and/or update the data. In order to ensure access of a rightful terminal to the storage medium, an input password is used to verify whether the terminal user is rightful.
Staff members, dispatched employees, part-timers and working students of a company have increasing chances to use their dedicated portable terminals. Since they carry their portable terminals to their customers/clients for use, the portable storage mediums/terminals themselves may be lost or stolen. Thus, there is a high probability that if the portable storage medium or built-in memory of the terminal contains highly secret important personal or enterprise information, the information will be disclosed to others due to pickup, robbery of the terminals and/or malice by a third party. In the past, since the portable terminals are mainly used in others' offices/companies, the environment of operating the portable terminals such as simplification and rapidness of operation of the terminals are considered as being more important than strict security management which brings about a complex input operation at the terminals. Countermeasures to meet leakage of the information due to loss/robbery of portable storage mediums and terminals and dispatched employees' and part-timers' malice are not satisfactory. If they know a user's password, or the password is incidentally hit, any particular one of them concerned can easily access data in the user's portable terminal/its recording medium with his or her personal computer and important information contained possibly in the terminal/recording medium may be disclosed to the particular person with high probability.
If portable terminals themselves have a user-settable mechanism for taking security measures, a third person can easily change its settings and hence the mechanism itself may impair the security.